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The fossil fuel divestment
campaign has become one of the most rapidly growing divestment movements in history and has unified
an impressive diversity of supporters—from liberal Californian universities to the Rockefeller’s family trust. But the contradictions between
divestment and the logic of neoliberalism are enduring, and arguments between campaigners and
their opponents are typically framed by questions relating to efficiency,
feasibility, and the ethics of using fossil fuels.

Such questions are certainly important to
ask, but we should also look beyond them, because by doing so we can uncover
the deeper ethical contradictions inherent to capitalism which shed important
light on strategies for change.

Economists and philosophers have long disputed
whether capitalism's theoretical potential to harness human self-interest for
the greater good of society is a virtue or a vice. Many argue that capitalism doesn’t just harness a natural human
inclination towards self-interest, but rather systematically cultivates it. Others point to the vast increases in
material wealth experienced around the world over the past centuries as all the
proof we need of capitalism’s
superiority; in this view, debates about
the morality of self-interest as the driving force of change become irrelevant.

But two particular
arguments against divestment demonstrate that capitalism not only cultivates
negative moral values, but actively suffocates positive ones as well.

The first argument claims that divestment is
hypocritical while we continue to depend on fossil fuels for our day-to-day activities. In short, we are urged not to abandon the
companies we rely on.

This argument is easily refuted. It is
effectively a preference to act consistently unethically rather than inconsistently ethically; a difficult position to defend in any context.
It also fails to recognise the significant differences that exist between the
agency of consumers and investors. Is a smoking addict who is determined to
quit obliged to invest their pension in Phillip Morris? Of course not—they are only
obliged to pay for their cigarettes. In the same way, our only obligation to
fossil fuel companies is that we pay for the fuel we consume.

As consumers, our actions are constrained by factors such as current energy and transport
infrastructures, and pressures to conform to environmentally-destructive social
norms. But as investors—of personal savings or institutional money—our agency, the choices available to us, and,
therefore, our moral responsibility, are radically different.

Moreover, the choice of
where capital is invested in the present strongly influences our future capacity for
low-carbon living. But by arguing that investments should be guided only by our
current, highly-constrained consumption patterns—rather than by moral values that
relate to the future well-being of humans and the world around us—opponents of
divestment are effectively advocating a position that would lead to a perpetual
suffocation of those values.

Even more revealing is the
fact that those who oppose divestment on the grounds of hypocrisy would make no
such accusation were it to be motivated by economic self-interest. Imagine a university
that holds shares in ExxonMobil and is also connected to a fossil-fuel
dependent national electricity grid (as many are). If the university’s investment
manager noticed that returns on the Exxon shares are falling, it’s inconceivable
that they would hold onto them—in the face of more lucrative share options—just
in case the decision appeared to contradict the university’s electricity supply. Rather, they
would simply reinvest in better-performing companies, as they are paid to do.

Hence, divestment is
considered perfectly legitimate if it is made for reasons related to profit but
not to morals. According to the logic of opposition to
divestment, the profit-motive is permitted to do things that moral imperatives are
not. Not only is profit-seeking rewarded, but morally-motivated actions are ridiculed
and opposed.

A second revealing argument against divestment is
that it leaves more opportunities for less scrupulous investors because those with more of an environmental conscience abandon the
marketplace. A more effective approach, according to
the critics, is for activists to become ethical shareholders by using their
investments to pressure fossil fuel companies to become part of the solution to climate change.

The typical response of
pro-divestment campaigners to this argument is that the kind of shareholder activism it recommends isn’t appropriate in this
case. Fossil fuel companies aren't like those who produce clothes or food or
electronics: the impacts of fossil fuels don’t just arise from the ways in
which the supply chain currently happens to operate; rather, they are
inseparable from the products themselves.

Lobbying a company to
improve wages and working conditions is one thing; lobbying them to stop
selling their primary product is another. Past experience suggests that it is therefore very unlikely that shareholder engagement could be successful
in the case of fossil fuels (although a more aggressive ‘forceful stewardship’ approach might have greater chance of success).

Either way, when such
debates become stalled on a choice between strategies it is easy to overlook
the way in which moral values are suffocated. From the perspective of those who
oppose divestment, market logic determines that it is better for investors to work
within the norms of the system, even to achieve moral goals. One divestment
skeptic puts it particularly bluntly, arguing that “moral outrage is not as effective as capitalism.”

Are such arguments
merely pragmatic—a call to take a
rational, consequential moral stance rather than an emotional, categorical one?

In considering this question,
it’s worth recognising that this argument sounds uncomfortably like those made
in the early days of capitalism, when profits depended upon slavery rather than fossil fuels. Owning
slaves was often justified via the argument that, if released, they could be in
an even worse situation, left at the mercy of the new exploitative
industrialist class. Therefore, it was better to keep
hold of slaves and treat them slightly better; a position which, at the time,
may have been considered rational in moral terms by some. However, a
transformation in values since the abolition of slavery has shown it to be indefensible.

Capitalism has
always strongly resisted any challenge to the energy source that lies at the
heart of its profits, whether that was from human-energy in the form of slaves
or fossil fuel-energy today. While benign changes around the periphery of
production are tolerated reluctantly, actions that threaten to achieve more
fundamental changes are deemed to have dangerous, unintended
consequences, or are dismissed as having no consequences at all. The
divestment campaign highlights how the logic of capitalism achieves this goal,
in part, by declaring moral inclinations to be obsolete whenever they threaten to
be transformational. Those campaigning for divestment must therefore prepare to
be ridiculed with accusations of hypocrisy, naivety and a
misguided sense of moral superiority.

Such accusations are especially harsh
given that most serious campaigners don’t believe that divestment is an effective tactic on its own. The
general consensus is that it is primarily a moral and political strategy,
not an economic one. But it is also crucial to recognise that not all opponents of
divestment are CEOs, industry lobbyists and Wall Street bankers who are set to
profit directly from fossil fuel companies going forward. They may also include
people who, if asked openly, wish for the same future as the average
environmental campaigner, but have had their own moral inclinations suffocated
by capitalist realism and the cynical view of human motivation that is the
foundation of neoliberal psychology.

The divestment movement
highlights a set of challenges to the future of capitalism that extend far
beyond its unsustainable environmental externalities. With considerable clarity,
it shows the ways in which market logic not only cultivates action that is led
by calculated self-interest, but also actively suffocates intrinsic human drivers towards questions of fairness and equality.

Fortunately, these values have evolved over tens of thousands of years and,
despite these latest attempts at suffocation, they will not die easily. The challenge—of particular importance for the
divestment movement—is to move towards a society in which our morals are worth
at least as much as our money, and ideally much, much more.

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